'Leadership has failed them once more'

"After promises from David Morgan [the ECB chairman] that they would never again be placed in such an invidious position, leadership has failed them once more," wrote Derek Pringle, one of the 13 originally banned, in The Daily Telegraph. But he also warned: "Uncertainty and obfuscation are the stock-in-trade of places like Zimbabwe and this tour is by no means settled."

Writing in The Guardian, Mike Selvey said that Robert Mugabe had acted with "the timing of a top comedian". He added: "[Mugabe] sat them on a whoopee cushion to end all whoopee cushions. Guess what lads, just when you thought you had it taped; just when the Sons and Daughters of News International had delivered their 11th-hour get-out trump a la Cape Town; just when, for the very first time, the members of the International Cricket Council, a body with all the natural flexibility of a whalebone corset, had moved onside, you are all coming to play after all because we are letting your scribblers in."

But The Times's Simon Barnes said that rather than blame Morgan, it was the ICC who were at fault. "No one in the ICC is prepared to consider that this is exactly what Mugabe wants of them. Rather worse, no one in the ICC has felt that support for a murderous dictator is not morally sound ... and as the ICC politicos assume their posture for the next round of power struggles in the game of cricket, so members of the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe are murdered. Once again, the ICC is relishing England's discomfiture. And if a few more Zimbabweans have to wear electrodes on their balls as a result, that's a small price to pay for pleasure."

Back to The Daily Telegraph where Kate Hoey, the former sports minister who last year visited Zimbabwe under cover, said that she had repeatedly warned the ECB not to be "drawn into a position where they would be used by the master manipulator Mugabe as a pawn in his battle for unfettered power. Now they have ended up looking pathetic with Morgan, in particular, resembling nothing more than a half-dead mouse."

The Independent warned that when England arrive, their visit will attract "considerable anger because it coincides with a controversial bill that critics of the Mugabe regime claim is driving out the aid organisations which have been a last line of defence for a population already threatened by famine and an HIV-Aids epidemic."

Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe the overtly pro-Mugabe Daily Herald merely reported that today's one-dayer had been postponed because England would be arriving late in Harare. It mentioned in passing that some media had been given accreditation late, but didn't touch on the real crisis which threatened the series.